On September 14th, 2017, we published revised versions of our Privacy Policy, Terms of Service and Website Use Policy and published a Cookie Policy. Your continued use of Lynda.com means you agree to these revised documents, so please take a few minutes to read and understand them.

- [Instructor] This course is accompaniedby exercise files that you can use to follow alongwith the demonstrations on screen.I've copied the exercise files to my desktop,but you can place them anywhere on your hard disk.The exercise files are organized by chapter,with one chapter for each chapter in the course.Within each chapter, you'll find subdirectoriesfor each video.Each of those directories is configuredas an Android Studio project.You can see that it's an Android Studio projectbecause it contains subdirectories called APP,that's the module, and gradle,and files called build.gradle and so on.

On Windows, you'll also see a directory named .idea.On Mac, that directory is still there,but it's hidden in finder.In order to open any of these projects,you'll need Android Studio 2.3.1 or later.That was the most stable version of Android Studioas of the time this course was recorded.To open any of the projects, go to the welcome screen,select open in existing Android Studio,and go to the desktop if that's where you copied the files.

You can press ctrl + d on Windows,or cmd + d on Mac,to jump to the desktop directory.From there open up the exercise files.Then go to the directory that containsthe project you want to work with.I'll go to chapter two.Then choose a directory that contains a project.The project should be marked with the Android Studio icon.Select it and click OK,and that will open the project.If you're using a more recent version of Android Studio,you might be prompted to update your gradle plug-into the most recent version.

Go ahead and accept any upgrades that are offered.Also, if there are any componentsfrom the Android SDK or support librariesthat your project needs,you'll be prompted to download those.And again, I recommend accepting all those prompts.All of the projects that are used in this coursehave a target SDK version of 25 for Android 7.1.And a minimum SDK version of API 19.They've been built with build tools version 25.0.2.

So you'll need to download that versionof the build tools to your system.If you don't have that version of the build tools,you can go to the SDK manager.From there, click on SDK toolsand click on show package details.Take a look to see which versionsof the build tools you have.You can have more than one version of the build toolsinstalled at the same time.When I recorded this course,I was working with build tools version 25.0.2.As for working with these versionsof various other components,SDK platform tools 25.0.4,SDK tools 26.0.1,and constraint layout 1.0.2When you test your application,you can use a device running Android 5 or later,but I recommend using version 7 if you can.

If you don't have a physical device that runs version 7,you can create one through the AVD manager.I'm demonstrating all of my applicationsusing a virtual device running on API 25.Android 7 .1.1So those are the exercise files.You can use these exercise filesthat are included with the course,or you can create your own appsto try out the techniques that I describe in this course.

Resume Transcript Auto-Scroll

Author

Released

6/15/2017

Once you've created your Android application and designed a user interface, you're ready to learn how to manage your app. This course prepares you to handle events and manage navigation in your Android app. David Gassner begins by explaining how to work with events. He describes the activity lifecycle—what actually happens when a screen appears and disappears—and shares some techniques for working with events using Java objects, lambda expressions, and open source libraries. Next, he covers how to manage navigation, start activities with explicit intents, send data to an activity, and open other apps with implicit intents.

David also shows how to send and receive broadcast messages that let you exchange data and notifications among the different tiers of your application. He demonstrates how to work with menus and the action bar, add a navigation drawer to a layout, and tackle advanced navigation techniques. Later courses in the Essentials series concentrate on other specific skills you can master.